Ed Miliband can draw a line under the Labour Party’s war by opposing plans for
secret courts

Ten years ago this weekend, more than a million protesters mustered on the streets of London to march against the Iraq war. A month later, the first wave of the Pentagon’s “shock and awe” bombing campaign hit Baghdad. Shortly afterwards, Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled as US tanks rolled into the capital.

Such anniversaries are a diary of doom for Labour. In May 2003, soon after Saddam’s effigy fell, the party achieved a lead on the Tories that was not replicated until this week, when Ed Miliband widened his advantage over David Cameron to 12 points. Tony Blair’s equivalent bounce, in the brief moment when the Iraq war seemed won, was quickly drowned in blood and blame. Mindful of once-devoted voters who denounced Mr Blair as a war criminal, Labour strategists are dreading the damage that Iraq may yet wreak on Mr Miliband.

Viewed through a 10-year-old lens, Iraq rates as a debacle on every conceivable matrix, bar the disappearance of a loathsome tyrant. Unwarranted, unwise and unlawful, the conflict ordained the deaths of 179 British service personnel and between 150,000 and 600,000 Iraqi civilians. When statistics are elastic and life so cheap, it is impossible to be precise.

The Blairite dream of reprocessing sectarian rivalries in New Labour’s democracy factory has failed. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki presides over a system riven by violence and corruption, in which the law is a weapon of the powerful and citizens are denied basic services. As the Sunni minority regroups, emboldened by the Syrian war, Iraq hovers on the edge of failed statehood.

None of this is Mr Miliband’s fault, and he has been at pains to say so. Having distanced himself in the leadership contest, he went further in his debut conference speech, telling delegates: “I do believe we were wrong… to take Britain to war.” In the audience, his brother David was caught on camera, angrily telling Harriet Harman: “You voted for it. Why are you clapping?” Among the other leadership candidates, only Ed Balls – an adviser to Gordon Brown at the time of the invasion – spoke out against Iraq, telling The Daily Telegraph: “On the information we had, we shouldn’t have prosecuted the war. [It] was wrong.”

The fault lines in Labour, cavernous in 2003, still run deep. The 139 Labour MPs who voted against Mr Blair in one of the biggest rebellions ever always disbelieved the case for weapons of mass destruction and the confected legal underpinning. Those who voted in favour, several of whom sit in today’s shadow cabinet, tend to maintain that, had we known then what we know now, there would have been no war.

Mr Miliband, who has just set up a shadow cabinet sub-committee on liberty and security, is planning an anniversary “intervention” in which he will reiterate that Labour was wrong to take the country to war. However mindful his strategists may be of a humanitarian disaster, they also have an eye on self-interest. Labour has lost “hundreds of thousands of votes” and yet, in the words of a senior figure: “Some Labour MPs still aren’t in the same place as Labour voters.” In other words, they remain unrepentant. If the Iraq anniversary proves damaging, then the Chilcot Inquiry, expected to report next year, will be more toxic by far.

Although Mr Miliband and Mr Blair are said to get on well during phone calls and occasional breakfast meetings, the new leader is rapidly distancing himself domestically from New Labour. He is likely to cement that impression in his pre-Budget speech on the economy tomorrow, while his policy reviewer, Jon Cruddas, last week offered a fierce critique in a speech to the Resolution Foundation, saying the party had seemed “remote and administrative”. Tomorrow Mr Cruddas may go further when he launches the Condition of Britain study, run by the Institute for Public Policy Research.

By contrast, Mr Miliband has had rather little to say about foreign affairs, deferring largely to Douglas Alexander and the shadow defence secretary, Jim Murphy, who will tomorrow argue for “preventative” intervention. Mr Miliband, who is finally planning to outline his foreign policy priorities in a major speech expected after the Budget, cannot afford for Labour to be made insular by recession or by the party’s newfound worship of tradition. Nor will he mimic the swashbuckling Mr Blair, who still senses, in Mali or Iran, another potential Agincourt at which to fight his “generational struggle” against Islamist extremism.

In truth, the rule of terror has, since 9/11, been mainly a chronicle of fears unfounded and atrocities uncommitted. Al-Qaeda is a headless franchise whose most potent weapon is Western paranoia and whose breeding grounds are the badlands left to fester or made more unstable by Western wars. Mr Miliband must set out how, under his premiership, Britain would help make the world safer by trade and tough diplomacy as opposed to bomb and bullet.

But first, he must, as he once put it, “draw a line” under Iraq. That cannot be done by disavowals of Blair’s war alone, or by the wringing of clean hands. Labour’s Iraq legacy has been written not only in blood but also in misguided statute and failed policies ranging from control orders to 42-day detention of terrorist suspects to the expansion of the surveillance state.

The latest aberration, advanced this time by a Tory-led government, is the “Secret Justice” Bill, which creates new legal authority for those in power to avoid scrutiny. Safeguards imposed by the Lords were quietly thrown out last week in the Commons by a single vote, leaving ministers potentially free to rule that, for reasons of state security, suspects may never hear the evidence against them.

These “closed material procedures” will, unless curbed now, mean that allegations of torture, rendition and lesser matters deemed by government to pose a threat to national security will be veiled in state secrecy. When justice is no longer seen to be done, it is safe to assume that it is not being done.

The Iraq legacy is already being played out in British courtrooms. More than a thousand former Iraqi prisoners claim mistreatment by British troops and, on Monday, the case of families of British servicemen who died in Snatch Land Rovers will begin at the Supreme Court. The possibility that former Labour ministers will be implicated in future legal actions makes it imperative that the Opposition crusades against covert hearings.

Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary, last week reminded the House of “the hugely important principle” of “transparency of justice”, and his party voted, in vain, for the Lords’ protections. Even so, Labour has been oddly silent on one of the worst outrages of this Government. With the shadow cabinet divided, no decision has been taken on whether Labour should demand that the changes be overturned when the Bill returns shortly to the Commons, or if it should “meekly accept” a measure that would forever diminish the rule of law.

If Mr Miliband hopes to vanquish the spectres of Iraq, this is his chance. Britain’s precious tradition of liberty and openness may rest on whether the man likely to be the next prime minister dares commit himself to one-nation open justice.